Examining gendered discourses from an African locale: towards an intrasectional feminist critical discourse analysis

Abstract

Following calls for transnational and decolonial perspectives in [feminist]CDA, this paper considers what it means to do a critical analysis of gendered discourses from a Global Southern perspective. It highlights how discourses from an African locale, with its complex local-global intra-action, provide another instance of the complexity of discursive and identitarian power in late modernity, arguing that this requires an intrasectional (not intersectional) feminist critical discourse analysis. Gendered discourses in a music video from hip-life, a localized hip-hop genre in Ghana, are examined to illustrate this argument. The analysis shows how the specific context examined recalibrates not just the social categories that often underlie feminist intersectional analysis but also gives us a complex view of power that interrogates CDA’s emphasis on top-down approaches to power, a binary conceptualization that does not account for the manifestations of the power-powerlessness dialectic within the same subject. The result is significant for both analysis and activism because a comprehensive global program for social transformation that includes non-Western contexts and their re visioning of our analytical lenses must attend to their rhizomic discursive-material entanglements if they are to be effective.